I'm Adam Manus, and you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast, Daily Jazz Advice,

coming at you, coming at you for day two of my solo week here at the piano peters in

europe i'm here in st louis but i'm at the steinway piano and this week i'm doing a sort of

basic jazz theory uh series here called how does that work you know like yesterday was altered

dominance today i want to be talking about diminished chords and how we

often use them in jazz. There's a few different ways you can use a diminished chord, but first

let's define what a diminished chord is. If we start on C, a diminished chord is built on minor

thirds. So we have C, E flat, G flat, and A natural.

So this chord is built around, at least in jazz, most of the time, it's built around the diminished scale.

For a straight up diminished chord, it's built around the whole half diminished scale.

So we go in a series of whole steps, C to D, half to E flat and then so on whole step half step whole step so e flat F F sharp G sharp a B C so if you skip a note

you get this C-diminish 7. Okay, so how do we use diminished chords in jazz?

Now, diminished chords are often used as a substitute for a seventh chord.

It can be, say here we have our C-diminish 7.

This could be acting as a 5 chord to D flat major.

You hear this all the time.

Right? From the half step below the dimension.

Or it could be going to B flat minor.

Essentially, these are used as part of a dominant seventh chord.

It can really be used as a dominant seventh flat nine, remember all altered extensions

from yesterday, from any root note, a half step below any of the notes in the seventh chord.

So wherever you would use a B7 flat 9, like say to E major, you could use one of these four, because's symmetrical diminished chorus so C or A.

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